Missionary Positions: Evangelicalism and Empire in American Fiction

Afterword

Afterword Secularism also flourishes in American literary studies and in the humanities more broadly to the degree that we rely on a secular liberal paradigm to avoid divisiveness in the classroom. This paradigm, part of whose work is to render religion a private matter of conscience and belief, has kept religion out of the curriculum of most academic disciplines apart from religious studies; even there, faculty typically provide students a model of detachment and objectivity, the secular scholarly gaze. Whatever the shortcomings of such a model, including its foreclosure of the possibility that committed intellectual exchangeamongcontendingpositionswithinacultureofreligiousplu ralism might be cultivated as a positive good, it remains entrenched insofar [as] our tools for engaging religion remain limited to a bland respect for others’ deeply held beliefs. So states Tracy Fessenden in Culture and Redemption in describing America ’s reluctance to critically assess deeply held religious beliefs in the classroom .1 To be sure this same reluctance has also impeded the reading and teaching of literary texts treating America’s evangelizing identity. This study of the missionary novel has been my attempt to address this subject forthrightly and in so doing to reclaim an understudied body of American fiction that illuminates America’s ongoing, contested discourse of Christian empire as major authors have depicted it over the last one hundred and eighty years. The fact that most of these novels are not well known or are read for reasons having little to do with their orientation to America ’s Christian errand to the world is owing in great measure precisely to this inveterate American preference for avoiding divisive religious issues, whether it be in the classroom or in book reviews of missionary novels. 198 • Afterword Yet a meaningful cultural historicism must engage this religious ideology because it is so embedded in America’s history. To that end I have tried to show that the genre of the American missionary novel comprises a distinctive discourse within a larger discourse of American empire. Its features,Ihaveargued,issuefromitsformal,inherentlydialogicproperties that permit readers not just to absorb impassioned, hortatory arguments about America’s mission to the unbelievers, as in a monological polemic, but also to apprehend multiple, often conflicting, perspectives. Then too, the novelist’s ability to express mixed feelings and contradictory thoughts of characters at war with their avowed ideals or mission also contributes to a cultural history of consciousness. By gathering these novels together and treating them as a canon, I hope that readers see how they speak to one another across the decades, affording an overview of America’s literary engagement with its evangelizing identity. This is the primary reason why I have examined the ideological coherence of each novel as a form of discourse. If these novels, or a select subset of them, are read once more— especially in the classroom—then they live again, continuing to perform theirculturalwork,butinanewcontextinwhichtheycanbeusedtoguide readers to a diachronic understanding of the way leading novelists have attempted to shape, or respond to, America’s role as a missionary nation. Finally, if these novels are to contribute to a more fully “usable past,” they must also bear on present and future directions of America itself. In God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, Conrad Cherry asserts that “America has been regarded either as a ‘light to the nations’ which by force of example will positively influence other peoples and perhaps draw them to an American haven of freedom, or as a chosen people with an obligation actively to win others to American principles and to safeguard those principles around the world.”2 This is one useful way of conceptualizing two very disparate visions of America’s missionary destiny. AnothermightemphasizetwopersistingversionsofAmerica’s celebrated notions of inclusiveness. In the first, America’s greatness lies in its ability to absorb and learn from other ways of being in the world. In the second, America’s historical missionary role is to convert the world to American ways of believing and valuing, to make, as it were, the whole world into an image of ourselves—an exercise in self-love and hubris. When presidential candidate George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, declared in a campaign speech in the summer of 2000, “our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world of Afterword • 199 justice,” he was employing the language of “civil religion” to articulate a Puritan-derived evangelical worldview adapted to...